Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Ming and His Symbols

I finally caught up to the new DVD of this movie last night, what a difference from that old OOP Image/Universal disc; this one rocks and is highly recommended. Was there ever a better sci fi rock score than Queen's for FLASH? No.

Maybe it's because I've been reading William Bramley's The Gods of Eden, but I was blown away by the many Masonic references scattered throughout the Mongo militia and the resemblance of Ming's "tests" of the earth via storms and "hot hail" to see if we recognize a malevolent intelligence behind it, and so indicate we've become a threat and require extinction. Also, one must dig the similarly comic bookish concepts of space beyond our world being "entirely" different than our scientists imagine.

Basically Zarkov's rocket is spotted by Ming's henchmen who escort it through the "Imperial Ray" (a wormhole if ever there was one) to the psychedelic skies of Mongo. In the capable hands of British director Mike (GET CARTER) Hodges, all this is presented more or less straight, and the implications are left to our own imagination. When Princess Aura (Ornella Mutti) explains to Flash that Ming stays in power by fanning the flames of war, hatred and intolerance between the disparate races of his planet. It's got eerie echoes of Bramley's book, which postulates that our earth has been plagued with alien-sponsored secret societies (such as the Brotherhood of the Snake and the Freemasons) who work for the same ends, i.e. the constant "down-pressin'" of humanity via playing both sides against the other, sparking international incidents, etc.

The sad thing is, in all our centuries and centuries under the thumb of this invisible foe (whom the angels name Anunukai) we've had no Flash Gordon able to defeat Ming, or even find him. In fact, Ming has so fleeced our eyes that even reading this you probably think I am MAD!

Mad you say? I'm just summarizing the vast amount of conspiracy theory which I've read, and which makes as much sense as anything else on this crazy rock we choose to call Earth.

The real thing to look at is not whether these things I've summarized are true, but if you are having a hostile reaction to them, and if so, why? Why are you afraid to try "believing" in something that might not be true? It's like when someone is suddenly and angrily determined to convince everyone around them they don't have an eating problem. We never thought you did, honey... until now. On the other hand, if you are too quick to believe it, maybe it's NOT true, after all. Our reactions to these ideas are just as, if not more, interesting than the ideas themselves since after all science itself has proven that the objective universe is dependent upon subjective perception, not vice versa.

By the same token, if science really was open to finding answers to the unknowable it would actively investigate all these crackpot claims. Instead it circles the wagons like the Pope at a New Age expo. Anyone with half a brain must wonder about a school of thought whose experts blush and stammer and get hostile (or laugh dismissively) when the possibility or radical new paradigms are first mentioned. The Galileos of today aren't hung in papal prisons by science, just sneered at, belittled, laughed out of academia, and exiled to their basement laptops, replete with tin foil wall coverings to keep the alien thought waves out. Meanwhile sticky green fingers operate the pope and the oil barons like puppets! It's ΙΧΘΥΣ three days old, don't buy it!

How much of all this I actually believe or disbelieve is immaterial and so it should be for you. Science wants you to believe in it solely and not be open to new theories that leave empirical positivism in the dust. These new controversial theories can't be proven because they are based on subjectivity via an expanded consciousness. We can't prove them to the sneering skeptics anymore than we can teach a dog calculus. All the dog can do, slowly and over eons of conscious evolution, is to realize the tasty graphite marking on his master's homework actually mean something. A few of us have always believed--deep down past rational thinking--that there's math and language on the homework of our masters, while the other dogs sneer and laugh and argue that language can't exist since it can't be smelled. Or as Criswell puts it: "We once laughed at the horseless carriage, radio, the electric light, even television!" Our five senses are pretty paltry when it comes to the vastness of our universe (we don't after all, see the barrage of cell phone, radio, TV and wireless internet waves bombarding us constantly), even here now in front of you, beyond the CRT screen lies infinity if you could only remove your alien-encoded blinders. Who is pulling the horseless carriage!? You are! Take off the blinders and the horselessness vanishes, the carriage vanishes, the vortex of rage and delusion you call yourself vanishes, and what is left? Pure radiance, Flash. You saved your earth; have a nice day!

Whoa, I've really run off on a tangent. Excuse me while I wait for the Masonic agents to cart me off to re-grooving. Meanwhile do see Flash Gordon, keep your eye out for the masonic and pump the volume as high as your neighbors will allow for his majesty the Queens: FLASH! Ahhhhahhhhh, he'll save everyone of us!

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Presenting gonzo-theoretical film criticism through the smashed-in doors of perception: from the subversive pre-code 1930s, to the psychedelic 60s, the sex apocalypse 70s, the space cowboy 80s, the candy flip 90s, and the simulacratic widescreen blur of the 'now', Acidemic is digging deep for the jugular, and the jug...

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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piercing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."- H.P Lovecraft